Gregory Peck- A Charmed Life

by Lynn Haney

  To make things tougher for Greg, Selznick was also concerned about the close-ups, worrying if the glamour standards were being upheld. He dispatched a memo to Hitchcock stating: ‘Peck’s beard is still showing a little too heavy . . . I can’t understand this as I understand he is now shaving three times a day . . . I don’t want to lose the quality of his face . . . but perhaps a different kind of powder and more of it is indicated . . . Also the wave in his hair should be changed to make him look more attractive.’

  Together Greg and Bergman created their own universe and it was one in which he felt safe. Locked inside those thick, windowless, soundproofed walls that so completely shut out the rest of the world, he could let down the barriers. At home with Greta, he had to negotiate his way through a real relationship and that was becoming more and more difficult for him. Since his parents had never really been able to talk to each other, he lacked the template for domestic communication. Playing a role with Ingrid, he felt comfortable and, at the same time, more alive. Hitchcock liked to say, ‘Drama is life with the dull bits left out.’ And Greg was finding acting in a drama much more exciting than quotidian family life. Romance is fun. Marriage is a lot of work.

  As for Bergman, she was always honest about her priorities and number one was her professional goals. Bergman told author Mike Munn: ‘Greg was a very handsome man – very sexy. It was difficult not to be attracted to him.’ Certainly this was true, but, at another time, Bergman made a comment that encapsulated her relationships: ‘I’m only interested in two kinds of people, those who can amuse me and those who can further my career.’

  While Spellbound was in the works, Selznick returned one day from a meeting with psychiatrist Mary Romm to find Bergman’s husband, Peter Lindstrom, had been waiting for him in his office. Lindstrom was concerned about his wife’s extramarital imagination.

  Instead of commiserating with the beleaguered husband, Selznick shared an insight he had gleaned from his shrink. ‘You’ll understand this,’ he said to Lindstrom. ‘I have a problem with Irene. I found this other girl, whom I love. It was terribly hard on me. How could I explain this to Irene and to myself ? So I went to this woman psychiatrist. I paid her double her fee. She gave me a scientific explanation why I had to leave my wife. I wanted you to know there is a scientific basis!’

  Like Greg, Bergman took great pleasure in the sheer business of making a film. She worked compulsively, making sure every detail, every gesture, every inflection of her screen character was just right. He operated the same way and they had much to talk about. Plus, he found, in contrast to her sophisticated professionalism, she had a charming naturalness, which he prized in a woman. Like Greg, she was not one to reflect on her own psyche. She coped with anxiety by ‘getting herself three or four ice-cream sodas by way of dessert’ and by falling in love.

  Hitchcock waved off Spellbound as ‘just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo psychoanalysis.’ And esteemed critic James Agee dismissed its treatment of psychiatry as lightweight, maintaining it contained ‘just enough of the Id as could be displayed in Bergdorf Goodman’s window.’ Other critics dismissed the whole psychoanalysis business as one of Hitchcock’s ‘McGuffins’, a device giving impetus to the plot but having little significance in itself.

  The film opened on 1 November 1945 at New York’s Astor Theater and became an immediate commercial hit. It had cost $2 million to make, quite a considerable sum for 1944, and it recouped $7.9 million on its first release. It brought Ingrid Bergman a ‘Best Actress Performance’ from the New York Film Critics’ Circle, although it was for The Bells of St Mary’s (1945) that she won an Oscar nomination that year. Spellbound’s Oscar nominations were for Michael Chekhov as Best Supporting Actor, for Hitchcock’s direction, for Miklos Rozsa’s superb score, and for the film itself – of them only Rozsa won. Peck got just $50,000, but the role continued his streak of triumphs.

  After Spellbound, Bergman went on to make Notorious (1946) with Hitchcock. By that time, they were good friends and, according to Bergman and Hitchcock’s biographer Donald Spoto, the actress confessed to Hitchcock that she was trying to get over a wrenching affair with the photographer Robert Capa. According to Spoto, the two sat down for what turned into a ‘boozy afternoon’ of reflection.

  During the talk, the ever-observant Hitchcock saw in Bergman’s features, according to Spoto, ‘a somewhat forlorn look and noted the absence of her usual ebullient good humor.’ Bergman’s evident distraction Hitchcock rightly took for emotional turmoil. Certainly he had his own emotions to hold in check since he had fallen in love with Bergman and she had graciously declined his attentions.

  Then, ‘as Hitchcock poured hefty drinks for them,’ Bergman confessed to her old friend ‘she was in love with Robert Capa . . . [and] saw no hope for the fulfillment of that love.’ Hitchcock listened sympathetically to the whole story, finally quoting a little speech from Spellbound: ‘It is very sad to love and lose somebody. But in a while you will forget and you will take up the threads of your life where you left off not long ago. And you will work hard. There is lots of happiness in working hard – maybe the most.’

  As for Greg and Bergman, they stayed friends through thick and thin. Greg put Ingrid up in his pantheon of all-time favorite leading ladies – along with Ava Gardner and Audrey Hepburn – no mean feat considering that Peck played in 60 movies.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Animal Magnetism

  ‘I thought of the guy in Duel in the Sun as a kind of rascal, a kind of spoiled kid of a cattle baron being given everything he wants. I didn’t see me as evil.’

  Gregory Peck, speaking about his role as

  Lewt McCanles in Duel in the Sun

  Back when Duel in the Sun was just a gleam in David O Selznick’s eye, his thought was to make a modest Western showcasing his mistress, Jennifer Jones. By the time the producer finished, Duel in the Sun was just about the most super-duper-Technicolor ever made. Nicknamed ‘Lust in the Dust’ and ‘Hump in the Sump’ (a sump is a pool where water is collected), it ended up costing over $5 million (which the film easily earned back), employing a huge cast and crew and taking an amazing 18 months to shoot. The movie’s unhealthy eroticism and flaming bad taste astonished Americans who associated Selznick’s name with family classics and love stories. Nonetheless, the dark sexuality and touch of obsession is exactly what moviegoers enjoyed the most.

  Greg watched from the inside as the producer became completely consumed with the project. ‘I knew Selznick was consciously putting on a Selznick Western,’ said Greg, ‘pumping it full of showmanship with an outsized cast and an enormous production, and I knew that he was intent on making Jones a great star, creating a movie that would overtake his wildly successful Gone With the Wind.’

  A nervy, ambitious actress, Jennifer Jones made a big hit with the public as a virginal young woman in The Song of Bernadette (1943) a role that won her an Oscar. Selznick was her Pygmalion, who had seized upon her raw talent and good looks and turned her into the saintly Bernadette. Subsequently, he insisted she never be typecast, but always show versatility and range. So in Duel, he cast her as the libidinous Pearl Chavez, ‘a full-blossomed woman built by the devil to drive men crazy.’

  Greg, aka Father Chisholm, seemed an unlikely choice for the male lead. Lewt McCanles was a rapist, a forger, a killer, a liar, a thoroughly rotten no-good – but with a certain likeability. Selznick, however, loved to toss the public a surprise, just as he was doing with Jones. He charted the popularity curves of Clark Gable and John Garfield and found that at that point in their career in which they played a ‘bad-boy’ part, their audience appeal soared.

  Greg rejoiced in his character’s lubricious wickedness. ‘I never enjoyed any role better than I did Duel in the Sun,’ he told Hedda Hopper. ‘You know, after my first pictures, I got the mantle of nobility flung around my shoulders. I didn’t like it. But I’m gradually breaking that concept down. And I think Duel will finish it off. In that character, I don’t have
one redeeming quality, but he has a whale of a good time. Does everything any man would want to do. Oh yes, he gets killed in the end, but that just lasts a minute. He sure enjoys himself while he has life.’

  From the outset, Selznick’s impact on the film went far beyond the mere financing and administration of production. Famous for his relentless memos, Selznick managed to rattle off hundreds during the course of Duel in the Sun. To him, a memo was a weapon – a creative outlet and a way of making sure his orders were followed. He boasted: ‘The difference between me and other producers is that I am interested in the thousands and thousands of details that go into the making of a film. It is the sum total of all these things that either makes a great picture or destroys it.’

  Selznick wrote the script for Duel, based on the novel by Niven Busch. It’s about the collision of the Old West – set in Squaw’s Head Rock – with the new, pitting wide-open spaces, hot-blooded outlaws and passionate resistance to railroads, civil authority and common decency. Beginning among giant rocks drenched in a blood-red sunset, with the velvet-voiced Orson Welles intoning the searing legend of doomed Pearl Chavez and her demon lover Lewt, Duel never strays far from lush romance, spiced with a dash of sadomasochism. Selznick fleshed out his concept with a huge cast including Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Harry Carey, Herbert Marshall, Charles Bickford, and Butterfly McQueen.

  Orphaned Pearl comes to live at Spanish Bit Ranch, where frail Laura Belle McCanles (Lillian Gish) tries to make a lady of her, despite her questionable origins and insistent voluptuousness. Pearl, the underdog, is torn between good and evil brothers, the reasonable, forward-looking, repressed Jesse (Joseph Cotton) and the unprincipled, spoilt Lewt, dividing a stormy household ruled by Sen McCanles (Lionel Barrymore). Pearl and Lewt are both victims of impulsive sensuality arising from their isolation.

  Duel was a film noir – a genre that regularly had an interest in erotic violence and in vindicating a notorious woman. Pearl’s famous ride out to exterminate Lewt anticipates the revenge cycle of Westerns. Fortunately, everyone in the movie seems to believe the story line, which makes for a fun ride in spite of the sadistic scenes and the downright hokiness of the plot.

  To direct Duel in the Sun, Selznick enlisted King Vidor – one of the few directors with the logistical know-how to handle such a sprawling film. A highly respected Hollywood figure, King Vidor was a superior movie craftsman, who started out making amateur movies in his hometown of Galveston, Texas. At MGM Vidor would direct his greatest films. His rise to super-director status began with The Big Parade (1925), starring John Gilbert and Renée Adorée; La Bohème (1926), starring John Gilbert and Lillian Gish; and the groundbreaking masterpiece of one ordinary man’s life, The Crowd (1928) starring James Murray and Eleanor Boardman. He also created Hallelujah (1929), the first motion picture by a major studio with an all-black cast, headed by Daniel L Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney.

  Vidor believed the movie director has a voice, a powerful and articulate sounding board, and he should use it well. He wrote: ‘The story in every man’s heart is human progress. I believe that every one of us knows that his major job on earth is to make some contribution, no matter how small, to this inexorable movement of human progress. The march of man as I see it is not from the cradle to the grave. It is instead, from the animal or physical to the spiritual.’

  Yet, Vidor was no moralist when it came to the opposite sex. So it is unlikely the movie’s erotic theme bothered him. Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, daughter of actor John Gilbert, was a starlet in Hollywood and had the opportunity to observe Vidor in action: ‘He was a talented filmmaker, but he went through women like Kleenex . . . He used them, was ruthless and went on to the next.’

  Going to work for Selznick, Vidor thought he was prepared for anything. As he recounts in his autobiography A Tree is a Tree (1953) at one time he lived across the street from the producer and he had ample opportunity to observe Selznick’s quirks. ‘At first I used to be awakened in the middle of the night by the arrival of machine guns and other odd sounds,’ remembered Vidor. ‘It seems that Mr Selznick had a private projection room in his house and he often ran films at the hour he was known to have started many other projects – midnight. Two or three full-length pictures would carry him well into the early morning hours. Selznick does everything at unconventional hours. He breakfasts at lunchtime or later; he sleeps when others are working; he works while they sleep – a sort of one-man revolution against conformity.’

  Selznick was a ‘big thought’ person who didn’t waste time on penny-pinching. If he wanted an actor, nothing would stop him until he had the performer under contract. The part Walter Huston played was scheduled for four days. Huston’s minimum salary for a picture at the time was $40,000 and his agent refused to make any concessions because of the brevity of the engagement. Selznick agreed to the sum but made certain that he could spread the work over ten weeks if he wanted. When Walter Huston finished in Duel in the Sun, Selznick had used up his ten weeks and was paying him overtime salary because the engagement had run over the specified time called for in the contract.

  As the Sin Killer in Duel in the Sun, Huston spouts some delicious lines, such as: ‘Pearl, you’re curved in the flesh of temptation. Resistance is gonna be a darn sight harder for you than for females protected by the shape of sows. Yes siree, Bob. You gotta sweeten yourself with prayer. Pray till you sweat, and you’ll save yourself from eternal hell-fire.’

  Legendary Lillian Gish proved to be another source of inspiration. (By the time she died, her career spanned films from 1912 to 1987.) Way back in 1927, she told Sidney Sutherland, who interviewed her for Liberty magazine: ‘You see we are in such a strange business out here. We of the screen are more intimately known to the public than any other men or women who ever lived. More people see our faces in one night than saw Napoleon in all his 52 years. We excite the emotions of our audiences; we incite their sympathy or dislike or laughter every evening; they know us by our given names or our surnames or our nicknames. Anything that happens to us is of obvious interest.’

  Before shooting started for Duel, Greg was told: ‘You’ll have to jump over a horse’s rear end and land in the saddle while it’s in full gallop.’ Not a small challenge for a man with a bad back. Greg signed on at a riding stable and trained for three solid weeks. He also mastered rope tricks and wore cowboy costumes from dawn until dusk to get used to the feel of Levi’s, a close hugging shirt, and high, cowpoke heels.

  Dice, a flashy black and white pinto colt spotted at a rodeo by a talent scout, was selected to carry Greg. The horse was known for its extraordinary ability to ‘track’ exactly in its own tracks. This is hard for a horse to do but very important to the filmmaker who must set his cameras and lights perfectly. When Dice was working on a scene, the trainer would walk him along the path that he was to follow. Once they were ready to film, Dice was turned loose and cued for the speed they wanted. Greg and Dice proved adept enough for the actor to ride his mount into a nightclub and rear it over the heads of the diners.

  Shooting began on 1 March 1945 at a location near Tucson. Almost immediately, Selznick’s over-active imagination and lack of discipline got the better of him. Preliminary sketches of ranch houses and streets were set aside and new ones were ordered. Episodes were added; beginnings and ends of scenes were changed; and previous estimates for cattle, cowboys, and cavalry had to be revised accordingly. Experts were called in as consultants on Western folklore, dancing and customs. Everything that had ever happened west of the Rocky Mountains was considered for the script.

  Meanwhile, Selznick’s obsession with Jones was building to the point where he was driving everyone crazy. Morning, noon and night, he was present, redirecting the actors, the cameras, and even the lighting. There were strict orders on the set that not a single scene was to be photographed, and not even a single angle of a single scene, until he had been consulted on the lighting, the setup, and the actors. By his own admission, ‘ninety-nine times out
of a hundred’ he felt something had to be changed.

  As filming progressed, Selznick’s behavior kept Jones in a state of mild hysteria. She had to get up every morning at 6 a.m. to apply Indian make-up, which also took a couple of hours at night to get off, so that in effect she was working 15-hour days for the better part of a year. This ongoing tension made her extremely enervated. She clawed, screamed and hit Greg as she performed at the extreme of her emotional range. Claimed Ginger Rogers: ‘She chewed him up and ate him for breakfast.’ Still, it was Jones’s smoldering intensity that somehow goaded the laconic Greg to come alive as the hell-raising Lewt.

  Charles Bickford who was cast as Sam Pierce, a gentle straw boss who is in love with Pearl, also kept Greg on his toes.

  ‘I had to draw on Charlie Bickford – and shoot him dead. There was just one small problem . . . he was a faster draw.

  ‘Every time we shot the scene, Charlie plugged me first. The director kept pleading with me to draw a little faster. “I’m drawing as fast as I can,” I told him. So he turned to Charlie and instructed him to let me beat him to the draw.

  ‘ “But,” Charlie growled, “It wouldn’t look right – let Peck go and practice.”

  ‘So we had to shoot the scene nine times before I outdrew him and he fell over “dead.” After the ninth take, the director shouted, “Print that” – and I could hear the relief in his voice.’